Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  To

  The Youth of America

  confronted by

  Lost and undone Romanists journeying

  To an endless death, to whom

  few speak and for whom

  few pray …

  in the hope and with the prayer

  that it may show them

  how to win Romanists to Christ

  Fulton’s little book, a polemic of anti-Catholic bigotry, was filled with lurid tales of human sacrifice, of nuns being violated by priests in convents, of onanism among monks in monasteries, of the fallibility of the Pope, and blamed the Catholic Church for everything from slavery to the labor movement. Quite typically, R. J. Cuddihy accepted the gift and thanked his friend, and never let Fulton know the considerable gaffe he had committed.

  Under Mr. Cuddihy’s stern and proper exterior he, too, was a sentimental Irishman. Like his partner, Mr. Funk, Cuddihy was quick to instigate lawsuits against any detractors of either Funk & Wagnalls or its precious Literary Digest. But when he won his cases, he inevitably paid the damages for which his opponents were assessed. In his strictly run offices, he would call errant employees into his chamber, dress them down thoroughly for their misdeeds, and then follow the scolding with an apology and an invitation to lunch. There is a persistent Funk & Wagnalls tale that one afternoon Mr. Cuddihy happened upon two of his Digest editors merrily fornicating among the Digest files or, as he discreetly put it later, “going at it.” Mr. Cuddihy muttered a confused apology, retreated from the scene, and then, after a decent interval had elapsed, summoned the fellow whom he had caught in flagrante to his office. “Young man,” he announced sternly, “you are going to have to accept a reduction in salary!” And it was done.

  A Father Wynne, a Jesuit priest, once said of him, “Catholics in New York as elsewhere are crushed under the burden of their churches and schools, but there is in this town one Catholic who has never said ‘No’ to anybody.… I mean Mr. Robert Cuddihy. His Literary Digest has an extraordinary influence in the United States.”

  And so indeed it did. After the Digest’s correct forecast of the outcome of the 1932 Presidential election, the editors of the Kansas City Journal-Post trumpeted, “Not even Franklin D. Roosevelt can feel more triumphant than the editors of the Literary Digest.” And the Digest editors themselves, in a rare moment of pride and self-congratulation, added a paean of their own to their magazine, saying, “When better polls are built, the Digest will build them!”

  In the early spring of 1936, the Robert J. Cuddihys celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a special Nuptial Mass in the Lady Chapel of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was then at 460 Madison Avenue. There was a big family party afterward, with relatives gathered from all corners of America. R. J. Cuddihy was seventy-three years old, and the Great Depression had affected his great fortune, and his great magazine, very little. The three Cuddihy sons, Paul, Lester, and Arthur, were now all connected with the Digest, and had made brilliant marriages to prominent (and rich) Irish Catholic women—Lester Cuddihy to Grandpa Thomas Murray’s daughter Julia. (At the time of the courtship, when Grandpa Murray was told that the Cuddihys were big in publishing, the great inventor said, puzzled, “Publishing? What is publishing exactly?”) The Cuddihys’ four daughters had also made good Catholic marriages—Mabel to T. Burt McGuire, Helen to William J. Ryan, Alice to Thomas Guerin, and Emma to Kenrick Gillespie. Grandpa Cuddihy’s money had built the elegant apartment house at 1088 Park Avenue, and his son Lester had had the idea of adding the large and fountain-filled central garden-courtyard, which makes 1088 Park one of the singularly pleasant addresses in New York today. (At first, it looked as though the building would be a financial failure, and so it became inhabited largely by other Cuddihys, McGuires, and Gillespies.) There were summers in Water Mill and cruises on Grandpa Cuddihy’s yacht, the Polly, and trips back to boarding school on the boat for the grandsons, when Father Diman himself, head of Portsmouth Priory, would come out and stand on the bluff to greet and bless the boys as the Cuddihy yacht sailed into Portsmouth Harbor. Meanwhile, the Literary Digest’s pollsters were busily at work on the upcoming November election, a contest between Alfred Landon and Roosevelt for a second term. And presently the results of the poll were out: It would be a landslide victory for Landon, with Landon carrying all the big states—New York, California, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and so on. The result of twenty million Digest ballots showed that Landon would win four votes out of every seven.

  What went wrong? Was it the sin of pride again? Because when the results were in, Landon had carried exactly two states, Maine and Vermont. It was an overwhelming victory for Roosevelt. Time magazine printed a picture of Grandpa Cuddihy with the caption, “Is Our Face Red!” And in its wisecracking style, Time noted that “The Digest mispredicted a Landonslide.” A solemn American political maxim used to be “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” The joke became “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.”

  Prior to 1936 the Digest had sent out the ballots for its polls to telephone subscribers, automobile registration owners, and to its own subscription list. In the 1936 poll, however, the telephone lists were largely abandoned, since it was felt that telephone books went quickly out of date. Perhaps that was the reason for the gigantic error. But some Digest people felt that there were other, more subtle, reasons. One editor commented that he felt that the Digest had become “punch-drunk,” and had begun to believe too completely in the myth of Digest infallibility which it had sponsored. (“When better polls are built …”) Others said that the Digest had gone wrong by failing to reach “the lower economic brackets” of the voting population. There had been other ominous notes. During the early Depression years, Digest circulation had dropped more than the Digest cared to admit, and profits were down accordingly. The Digest had also begun to feel the competition of newer, sprightlier weeklies such as Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. The Digest’s own explanation was a somewhat mysterious one: Republicans, it said, answered questionnaires more readily than Democrats. This left the reason in the realm of the occult. But one thing was absolutely certain: The Literary Digest, which had a few days earlier been a great and trusted American institution, was suddenly a national laughingstock, and all over the world “Literary Digest jokes” proliferated, rather the way Polish jokes spread in the early 1970’s. On the day of the debacle, Mr. Funk and the three Cuddihy sons either avoided the office altogether or else put in only momentary appearances. Mr. Robert J. Cuddihy, however, came into the office at the usual hour and went about his business as though nothing had happened.

  H. Lester Cuddihy, who had been for Landon, wired his young son Jack at Portsmouth Priory, saying simply, “Ha ha.” But Lester Cuddihy’s wife, Julia, sent another telegram to Jack, saying, “Don’t write anything fresh to Grandpa. He feels very badly. Mom.”

  By the issue of July 17, 1937, things at the Digest were in such dire shape that Funk & Wagnalls actually gave the Digest away—to the publisher of Review of Reviews, and the combined result was called by the unwieldy title of The Digest: Review of Reviews Incorporating the Literary Digest. It did not do well. By October of the same year, this amalgam was sold, and the name Literary Digest was reapplied to the new result. This attempt at a resuscitation was also a failure, and with the issue of February 19, 1938, publication was suspended—temporarily, it was hoped—and a pathetic letter was sent out to ten thousand subscribers which begged:

  Literary Digest is not just another magazine; it is an American Institution of major importance. It cannot be allowed to die.… We ask you to put a dollar in the enclosed return envelope.… Your dollar will be credited to your subscription as an increase in rate.

  Quite a number of dollars floated in, along with several outright gifts. But for soliciting and accepting this sort of charity, and tampering in an irregular way with rates and circulation methods, the Digest attracted the attention of the newly created Audit Bureau of Circulations. Funk and Cuddihy had fought against the cr
eation of the Bureau, and its goal to create a standard and uniform method of tabulating magazine circulations, throughout their entire professional lives. Now it was the ABC that would administer the coup de grâce to the Digest. The ABC demanded that the cash gifts be returned, and petitioned the court to reorganize the magazine under the Bankruptcy Act. Time gleefully reported the death statistics:

  Against liabilities of $1,492,056 (including a $60,000 demand note to Funk & Wagnalls—original Literary Digest publishers—$63,000 for paper, $30,000 for printing, $612,000 to readers for paid up subscriptions), the Digest listed assets of $850,923: cash on hand, $222,293; mailing lists, furniture, machinery, $377,794; deferred charges, $160,821; goodwill, $90,015.

  This last figure sounds the saddest of all. After three months’ suspension, Time took over the Digest’s 250,000 unexpired subscriptions.

  Funk & Wagnalls—and the Cuddihys—at least still had Emily Post and Etiquette. And, as someone had commented at The Players Club on the day the news was released of the Digest’s sale to the Review of Reviews, “All I know is that when R. J. Cuddihy lets go, you know that the cow has been milked dry.”

  Chapter 7

  THE ORIGINAL BUTTER-AND-EGG MAN

  The Cuddihy family tree becomes a rather confusing one to contemplate, not only because of the profusion of children and grandchildren, but also because one is required to remember that Mr. R. J. Cuddihy’s daughter, Mabel, married T. Burt McGuire, and one of his granddaughters, Mary Jane (Lester Cuddihy’s daughter), married James Butler MacGuire—no kin, different spelling—which makes the tree sprout with a collection of both McGuires and MacGuires, and which union (the Cuddihy-MacGuire union, that is) brought the Butler family fortune into the wealthy Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy family complex. One way to sort out the McGuires from the MacGuires is to remember that the MacGuires today are all descendants of both Grandpa Murray and Grandpa Cuddihy, while the McGuires are descendants of Grandpa Cuddihy only.

  The MacGuires, meanwhile, would be nobodies if it had not been for Grandpa Butler. James Butler was born in County Kilkenny in 1855, where the Butlers had been farmers for fifteen generations. The original Butler, it is said, was a Norman officer who came across with William the Conqueror. He was William the Conqueror’s butler, and the French branch of the family is called Le Boutillier. In 1328 a Butler was created Duke of Ormond, and lived in Kilkenny Castle, and the American Butlers today use (for this somewhat tenuous reason) the royal Ormond family crest. James Butler’s antecedents, however, were not royal, but the family must have had some small amount of property, and were not impoverished tenant farmers, because when James Butler emigrated to the United States in 1875 at the age of twenty he had inherited a hundred pounds (then about five hundred dollars) from an uncle, and had received some education at the parish schools near his family’s farm outside the village of Russelltown. This small nest egg was sufficient, when he came ashore in Boston, to keep him in an inexpensive rooming house—and not force him into one of Boston’s notorious cellars—while he looked for a job.

  Because young James Butler had been a farm boy, he first went to work for a farmer named Dresser near Goshen Mountain, Massachusetts, where he started out tilling land with a hoe. One of his brothers, meanwhile, had also come out of Ireland and had gone to Urbana, Illinois, to work in a railroad hotel. After a year or so behind the plow, James Butler followed his brother there and got a job in the same hotel as a steward. From there he went to Chicago, where he joined the staff of the Sherman Hotel, working in the kitchen and learning a bit about the purchasing, preparation, and storage of food. Gaining confidence as a hotel man, he next went to New York, to work for the old Windsor Hotel, where he was given the job of preparing President Grover Cleveland’s first inaugural banquet. “I was the busiest man in the United States that night,” he used to say of the experience. (Twenty-four years later, he would decline an engraved invitation to President Taft’s inaugural, saying, “I don’t even like to think about inaugurations!”)

  From the Windsor, he moved on to the old Murray Hill Hotel, and he might well have remained a hotel man for the rest of his life had he not moved into a rooming house operated by the mother of a young ex-reporter named Patrick J. O’Connor. Patrick O’Connor was a melancholy fellow who had been told by his doctor that he must get into some business that was less “nerveracking” than newspaper work. O’Connor had opened a small grocery store, but in the evenings, around the boarding-house dinner table, he moaned and complained about how poor business was. “It’s in a bad part of town,” he would say sadly, “and I can’t afford to move to a good one.” Finally, James Butler had had enough of this, and said, “O’Connor, stop complaining. How much do you need to move to a good part of town?” O’Connor replied that he would need at least two thousand dollars. James Butler, who, even then, was exercising a trait for which he would become famous—a dislike of spending money, and a habit of squirreling away every penny he could in savings banks and mattresses—said, “All right, I’ll stake you.”

  Together, the two new partners scouted for a new location, and found one at 857 Second Avenue. Since both partners were Irish, Butler suggested that they paint the storefront green, and the little green-fronted grocery store called P. J. O’Connor & Company opened for business on September 2, 1882. For a while, James Butler wore two hats, buying food for the Murray Hill Hotel and groceries for the store, but as the store with the eye-catching front began to prosper and to consume more and more of his time, he quit the hotel business and gave his full energy to groceries. In 1883 the partners bought a second store and painted it green at Tenth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and a year later James Butler bought his partner out. He was twenty-nine years old, and his own man.

  At the outset, his stores—now called James Butler, Inc—were designed to offer quality merchandise at more or less carriage-trade prices. Butler stores offered generous credit, and made deliveries. But as he expanded—with a third green-fronted store, and then a fourth—he decided that credit and deliveries were “a lot of damned nonsense.” He cut out the nonsense, slashed prices, cut out deliveries except to a few housebound old ladies, and concentrated on quantity sales at a small margin of profit. To keep his overhead low, he staffed his stores with just two, or at the very most three, young clerks, and to keep his overhead even lower, he hired only young Irishmen—many of whom he would buttonhole as they came down the gangplank—who were eager and hungry and would work hard for small wages. As his profits increased, he bought more stores. By 1909 he owned or controlled two hundred stores, all painted green, doing $15 million worth of business a year. He had become not only the first, but the largest, grocery-chain-store operator in the United States and had acquired, in the process, a considerable amount of New York real estate. By 1929 James Butler was personally worth more than $30 million, an impressive gain on his original investment, and in the summer of that year he outwitted the stock market by selling $1 million of property at peak, pre-Crash prices. Before he was through, there would be eleven hundred stores.

  In 1883, James Butler had married a sweet-faced Irish girl named Mary Rorke, who bore him, all told, eleven children, only four of whom survived birth or childhood diseases. All that child-bearing must have taken its toll, because Mary Butler died in her early forties. But the loss of his wife was the only thing that occurred to mar his dream, which, he often said, had from the outset been a fourfold affair: “To become rich, to raise a family, to own a stable of thoroughbreds, and to add to the glory of the Catholic Church—with a good room in Heaven waiting for me at the end.” James Butler’s first horse had been a mare that he had ridden on the farm back home in Ireland, and it is said that a love of horses is in every Kilkenny man’s blood. In 1894 he bought his first trotter, which he named Russell T. (after Russelltown), and he began driving in amateur races. When, in the early 1900’s, he bought 350 acres of rolling Westchester farmland, and built himself a huge Victorian country house, surrounded by porches, on
the property which he christened “East View Farm,” he bought more trotting horses and began shipping them off to races at Belmont Park, on Long Island. Mr. Butler—who, now that he owned a big estate in Westchester, liked to be called “Squire Butler”—was not overly generous with his wife in terms of money, nor did he believe in betting on his own horses. But whenever his wife wanted money to buy something for the house, or for herself, or for the children, he would give her a tip on the horse likeliest to win, and see that her bets were placed properly. She usually won. In those days there was no parimutuel system, and bets were placed with bookmakers who skulked around and about the racetrack. At the family breakfast table, Mrs. Butler would inevitably ask, “Well, what shall we pray for today, dear?” “Pray for good weather and a fast track” was his usual reply.

  Shipping horses all the way from Westchester to Long Island was, the Squire soon realized, a costly business. There must be a cheaper way. The cheaper way led him to acquire, in 1902, the land on which to build what he named the Empire City Racetrack, in nearby Yonkers. At first, Empire City offered only harness races, but Squire Butler decided that there was more money to be made in racing thoroughbreds, and so he switched to that. This immediately put Squire Butler at loggerheads with the New York Jockey Club, which, having supreme control over New York racing, refused to give him a license. The Jockey Club was also one of the strongholds of New York’s Protestant Establishment, and James Butler was an Irishman, a Catholic, and an outsider to the little circle. Led by such New York bluebloods as John Sanford (of the Bigelow-Sanford carpet fortune) and Harry K. Knapp, the club went out to do battle with the doughty Squire, never suspecting that they might have met their match. Butler complied with every legal requirement for operating a thoroughbred racetrack and, after a court battle that lasted from 1904 to 1907, he won. Needless to say, James Butler became the first figure in thoroughbred racing who was never asked to join the club. “To hell with them,” he used to say.